Foundationalism

By Sosa, Ernest

Some foundationalists are rationalists who rely on intuition and deduction. Others are empiricists, in a broad sense, and accept observation and induction or abduction or yet other ways ...

Cyrenaics

By Tsouna, Voula

The Cyrenaic school was a Greek philosophical school which flourished in the fourth and early third centuries bc. It took its name from the native city of ...

De Sanctis, Francesco (1817–83)

By Henry, Barbara

Francesco De Sanctis was a literary critic and historian of Italian literature. He is best remembered for his major work, Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature), ...

Free will

By Strawson, Galen

‘Free will’ is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without reference to the will. Its central questions are ’What is it to act (or ...

Free will

‘Free will’ is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without reference to the will. Its central questions are ‘What is it to act (or ...

Hell

By Adams, Marilyn McCord

The ancient idea that the dead go to a dark subterranean place gradually evolved into the notion of divinely instituted separate postmortem destinies for the wicked and the ...

Scientific realism and antirealism

By Fine, Arthur

Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective ...

Substance, mode, and accident in modern philosophy

By Silverman, Alex

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited, and were witness to, the decline of the metaphysics of substance, mode, and accident of the Aristotelian tradition. The causes of this ...

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709–51)

By Wellman, Kathleen

La Mettrie is best known as the author of the eighteenth-century materialist manifesto, L’Homme machine (1747). His interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine, ...

Moralistes

By MacLean, Ian

The moralistes constitute a tradition of secular French writing about human nature and political and social behaviour principally in the context of the court and the salon. Their ...

Technology and ethics

By Miller, Glen; Mitcham, Carl

Research on ethics and technology investigates how technologies (human-made physical entities, often called tools or artifacts) directly or indirectly affect voluntary human behaviour. The scope of these studies ...

Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de (1816–82)

By Bernasconi, Robert

Although best remembered as the author of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Gobineau’s main literary activity was as a novelist and writer on Asia. Even though his ...

Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von (1842–1906)

By Adair-Toteff, Christopher

Eduard von Hartmann was born in Berlin and lived there for most of his life. He was a prolific writer of both scholarly and popular works on a ...

Santayana, George (1863–1952)

By Lachs, John

George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, novelist and poet. Born in Spain, he moved to America as a child and attended Harvard, studying under William James and Josiah ...

Epistemology

Epistemology has been traditionally concerned with questions about the nature, value, and scope of knowledge, together with other questions that arise in relation to these. Hence, another name ...

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971)

By Marty, Martin

Reinhold Niebuhr is widely regarded as the foremost public theologian in twentieth-century America. A ‘public’ theologian is one who is responsive to the biblical tradition and responsible to ...

Frankfurt School

By Honneth, Axel
Translated by Thomson, Bridget; Bull, Michael

The origins of the circle of philosophers and social scientists now known as the Frankfurt School lie in the 1920s when a number of critics and intellectuals were ...

Causation, Indian theories of

By Perrett, Roy W.

Causation was acknowledged as one of the central problems in Indian philosophy. The classical Indian philosophers’ concern with the problem basically arose from two sources: first, the cosmogonic ...

Moral justification

By Scanlon, T.M.

Questions of justification arise in moral philosophy in at least three ways. The first concerns the way in which particular moral claims, such as claims about right and ...

Music, aesthetics of

By Trivedi, Saam

Philosophical reflection on music goes back in the West at least as far as the Pythagoreans and Plato, and has undergone an exceptionally fertile period within analytic philosophy ...

Music, aesthetics of

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Nagel, Thomas (1937–)

By Sedivy, Sonia

The comprehensiveness of Thomas Nagel’s approach to philosophy sets him apart among late-twentieth-century analytic philosophers. Nagel develops a compelling analysis of the fundamental philosophical problems, showing how they ...

Naturalized philosophy of mathematics

By Paseau, Alexander

There are three types of naturalism in the philosophy of mathematics: metaphysical, epistemological and methodological. Metaphysical naturalists maintain that all entities are natural. One reading of this claim ...

Chaadaev, Pëtr Iakovlevich (1794–1856)

By Walicki, Andrzej

Pëtr Chaadaev was the first Russian thinker for whom his own country became a philosophical problem. His works initiated the powerful Russian tradition of reflecting on Russia’s whence ...

Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979)

By Callinicos, Alex

Herbert Marcuse endured a brief moment of notoriety in the 1960s, when his best-known book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), was taken up by the mass media as the Bible ...